When a vehicle undergoes side collision, an inertia force may be generated on an exterior door handle so that the handle rotates in an opening direction of a door. In this case, the door may be opened, and a driver or a passenger can be pop out of the vehicle.
To prevent the above phenomenon, various door opening prevention devices and methods have been applied, for example, by mounting a balance weight on a handle lever to interlock with the exterior handle from inside a door panel or by increasing a spring momentum for interlocking with the exterior handle.
As a performance test on the above door opening prevention devices and methods, there is a side collision evaluation test conducted on an actual or prototype vehicle in which the door opening prevention device is mounted.
However, an improved device for preventing the door opening from the side collision is necessary and a side collision evaluation test must be carried out on the actual vehicle, thus increasing investment of cost and hours.
Furthermore, if there is a performance problem during the evaluation on the device for preventing the door opening on the actual vehicle, the device must be redesigned and the side collision test must be also reevaluated, thus further increasing costs.
In consideration of such problems, a separate evaluation tester has been used for simulating the actual vehicle side collision evaluation on the door opening prevention device before conducting the actual vehicle evaluation.
However, this separate evaluation tester requires a separate door assembly structure to create an acceleration of an actual vehicle condition and requires a separate collision barrier or object for a door assembly, thus increasing manufacturing cost and decreasing test efficiency. In addition, the door assembly has to be remanufactured when a reevaluation test is necessary, and different testers must be manufactured for different kinds of vehicles for various side collision tests.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the disclosure, and therefore, it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.